My maternal grandmother's first husband, Fretless Roscoe Lee Ozum, could banjo like a trouper when he got warmed up, but he said that there comes a time when it takes you so long to warm up, everybody is already tired of listening to you. That's what comes of getting old, he said. So that was when he founded the Square County String Band, to be amongst his own kind.
So only old timers were allowed into the Square County String Band; and this was long before the days of political correctness so he could do this. (You probably could do it even now.) Over a period of time he got a bunch of guys around his age together to play music off by themselves. Roscoe said that if your wife is in the house and she hears you playing the fiddle or anything she decides you have time on your hands and finds something for you to do. (Sometimes it makes you think. Those great old players, you know — they hardly ever went home. I guess if there had been more women musicians they would have married them.)
Well anyway he founded this string band. The name of it came from the fact that the great majority of Kansas counties are square as a slice of bread, as soon as you get away from the northeastern part, where it's just about the same as Missouri anyway. And it happened that every county that contained a member of this band was one of the square ones.
The only trouble was that these square counties were spread all over the state, so the band members had to drive hundreds of miles to get together, and they had plenty of disagreements at first about where to meet. At first they would change the place each time, so as to give everybody a chance to stay near home at least once in a while. But you know back then nobody could afford long distance calls or telegrams, and letters would get crossed and you would often have stranded musicians who went to the wrong place.
They finally decided it would be fair to meet in a place that was about the same distance from all of them, and that was Thundercloud, Nebraska, at the junction of Highway 281 and Nebraska Byway 136, on the Republican River, and so far from just about anyplace that some people didn't know prohibition was over. So each meeting was up at Thundercloud, and then since they had to stay a few days anyway, to rest up from driving, they would give a concert, because Thundercloud is where the Overland Stage Company Memorial Prairie was set up, in 1902, and it had lawns with picnic tables on them.
Well, it wasn't too long before the band broke up. Burn-out, they call it nowadays; too much excitement and stress. But before that the whole town would come out to the concerts, and Monaural Studios sometimes came and recorded them, and everybody in the town would buy a record to help pay for their gas; and all the records that have been found are in mint condition, too, except the first one, which has never been found.
So anyway this tune was on the lost first record, made up at Thundercloud, and it's called the Square County Polka. The tuning is gDGBD, but it's played in C (or capo up 2, and play in D, but still out of the C position). Review your C chords (C, G7, Dm, and Am) for G tuning and you'll know where your fingers are supposed to be in each measure:
In the tab below, the notes on the first string that are in parentheses can be "skipped" or you can brush in those places, or you can play it the way it's written.
This is a syncopated tune which as a compromise I tabbed in 4/4 time, which makes different measures have different rhythms but is much simpler to read than actually tabbing the syncopation. The basic rhythm is da DUM da DUM da. The first few measures have accent marks over the DUMs. With the chukas the rhythm is da DUM chucka da DUM chucka da. I play it a little bit dotted. (Fretless Roscoe Lee Ozum used to say that if syncopation had been invented before musical notation, there never would have been any notation; they would have just throwed up their hands in despair.)
